


Interlude

by grrlpup



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-08-31 19:16:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8590444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grrlpup/pseuds/grrlpup
Summary: There's a piano in the dining room.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [shoot the sunshine into my veins (Make It Work Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8457187) by [everybodylies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everybodylies/pseuds/everybodylies). 



The temperature had dropped along with the weak November sun, and a few snowflakes fell through the dusk. Joan Watson hurried to unlock the front door of the brownstone, two bags of groceries wedged in the crook of her arm. Once inside, she set the groceries down and flexed her gloveless fingers.

“Sherlock?” she called. She hung her coat next to an unfamiliar, but unmistakably classic, Burberry. The creamy cashmere scarf folded neatly beneath it made Joan certain.

“Ms. Hudson?” she called this time.

“In the kitchen!” Ms. Hudson’s voice wafted back to her. Joan scooped up the groceries and followed it, smiling.

Rounding the corner, she stopped in her tracks at the sight of a grand piano filling most of the dining room, leaving barely enough room for the table. Sherlock’s legs, in trousers and argyle socks, stuck out from beneath it.

“Sherlock?”

One hand flapped impatiently at her. The other wasn’t visible, but she could hear him tapping the piano’s underside.

With an effort Joan turned toward the kitchen again. “Ms. Hudson, what a pleasure! Sherlock didn’t tell me we’d be seeing you today.”

“Here, let me take these.” Ms. Hudson confiscated her bags and brushed her cheek with a kiss. “And I’ll make some tea. You’re half frozen.”

 

Joan curled her hands around the hot teapot, inhaling the darjeeling’s delicate astringency. While the leaves steeped, Ms. Hudson whisked from counter to cupboard to refrigerator, putting away Joan’s groceries in a manner that would prove, Joan knew, both exquisitely convenient and suggestive of new combinations of ingredients.

A minute later, Ms. Hudson poured the golden tea into their two cups. A third sat beside them on the counter, but Sherlock was still examining the piano’s underside. From time to time he reached up to plunk a note, or pumped one of the pedals.

“I’ll explain,” Ms. Hudson told Joan with a smile. “But first, how are you doing? You seemed a little tired when you came in.”

Joan savored the novelty of simply being asked how she was, rather than being observed and then told. “I’m fine,” she said. “Really. I think it’s the winter settling in. It’s bracing in its own way once it’s here, but there’s something about this part of the season…”

She sipped, then ran a finger around the rim of her cup, avoiding the kindness she knew was in Ms. Hudson’s eyes. Even Marcus had noticed she was flagging, Joan thought. Those case files she was going to look over-- he could have gotten them to her today, but had made an excuse about Records being slammed and told her he’d drop by tomorrow-- she should get some rest. Joan had to admit, she was glad to have an evening without crime.

Depending, of course, on what was up with the piano.

“Well. The piano!” Ms. Hudson said, too tactful to question Joan further. “A friend of mine, a patron from years ago, passed away recently.”

“I’m sorry,” Joan said softly, as Ms. Hudson paused, seeming to look into the past for a moment.

“Thank you,” Ms. Hudson said. “It wasn’t unexpected. He did have time to say goodbye, make arrangements.” She took a breath and continued. “Philip left this piano to his niece, Erica. A lovely girl, and a fine violinist in her own right. It was a wonderful gesture, but Erica’s living in a tiny dorm room while she’s at conservatory.” She laughed. “She’ll have to find it a proper interim home, but in the meantime there was just enough... _whimsy_ in my friend’s will that I mentioned it to Sherlock. And he invited me to have the piano moved here in the meantime.”

“Whimsy?” Joan repeated.

Sherlock popped up from the floor and joined them, picking up the empty teacup and turning it in his hands. “There is a handwritten annotation on the section of the will bequeathing the piano,” he told Joan, “which reads, and I quote, ‘to lead you toward the music.’”

“Lead you toward the music?” Joan repeated. “It sounds like he’s encouraging her talent.”

Ms. Hudson pursed her lips, thinking. “Philip was artistic, but not one for a pretty phrase like that,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like him.”

“So you think there’s a hidden message in the will?” Joan said.

“Or,” Sherlock said, “in the piano itself.” He gestured with his chin. “There was a further stipulation that although the piano could be moved, no one is to tune it until its new owner is graduated from her studies, or has designated a new custodian for the piano.”

“That can’t be enforceable,” Joan said. “But it does make it sound like maybe something’s hidden in the piano somewhere. That’s what you were checking?” she asked Sherlock.

“At first,” he replied. “There is also something _soothing_ about merely lying under a piano; I spent a good deal of my boyhood that way. The point is,” he said, “neither Ms. Hudson, nor myself, nor Luc found anything out of the ordinary on, in, or around the piano.”

“Luc?” said Joan.

“You remember Luc,” Sherlock said, making a “speed up” gesture with his hand. “The sole mover I allow to enter the brownstone.”

“Oh, right,” Joan said. “The one I met that time you stole all my stuff and brought it back here.”

Sherlock started to retort, but Ms. Hudson spoke first. “In a way,” she said as though she hadn’t been following their bickering, “it’s strange that Philip left the piano to Erica at all. She is the only musician, the only artist really, in that family. The rest of them would just sell it off. But Philip used to have a very good violin, much more valuable than the piano. Where did that go?”

“Did he ever have any financial problems? He might have sold it at some point, if it could bring in more money than a piano,” Joan said.

“Perhaps.” Ms. Hudson looked sad for a moment. “He would have had high medical bills, toward the end.”

Joan put her hand on Ms. Hudson’s. “I’m glad Erica has your help now,” she said. “If there’s anything we can do...and of course we can keep the piano here as long as you need.”

“Indeed, I may sleep under it tonight,” Sherlock threw in with a short nod.

“Thank you both,” said Ms. Hudson. “And Sherlock’s asked Erica to come by with me tomorrow, Joan. Just in case she can shed any light-- and I know she’ll want to thank you herself.”

 

After supper, Joan carried her coffee up to the living room. Sherlock sat on the floor in front of the bookshelves, paging through one of his antique geology texts.

“Rocks,” he said when Joan caught his eye. “Eternally fresh, Watson. Their study rejuvenates me like little else.”

“Don’t tell the cigarette ashes, they’ll be jealous,” Joan said. “And what do rocks have to do with the piano?”

He blinked. “Nothing, so far as I know.”

Joan settled herself on the sofa and studied him.

He looked up again after a few seconds. “Yes?”

“You never do this,” Joan said. “Once you’re on a case, you eat, breathe, and lack-of-sleep it as long as it takes.”

“This is hardly a _case_ , Watson,” said Sherlock. “It is the slightly eccentric transferral of a piano to a young musician.”

“Hmm,” said Joan. Sherlock returned to his book and the room was quiet for several minutes.

“ _Yes?_ ” said Sherlock.

“But you invited that young musician over tomorrow,” Joan pointed out. “You wouldn’t do that unless you’re interested in this not-a-case. Therefore, you are _pretending_ not to be interested.”

Sherlock looked back at his book with a grimace. After a few seconds he looked up again and closed the book with a small bang. “You reassure me, Watson,” he said.

“What?”

“Well deduced. I have seen your weariness these past few weeks,” he continued, laying the book aside and rising to his feet to pace. “You complete the work requested of you, but your enthusiasm seems at low ebb. Perhaps not surprising, given, as you have said, our role in the punishment business.”

He threw one arm toward the piano. “ _Et voila!_ This, Watson, is most unlikely to involve a crime. It is, indeed, a _treasure hunt_. Helping a young artist, a friend of our own Ms. Hudson, to unwrap the gift left her by a beloved relative.” He beamed at Joan.

Joan tried not to smile. “It’s a present for me.”

“A palate cleanser, I hoped. And,” he hastened, “ _not_ a training exercise. I do not know if there is more to the bequest than meets the eye, nor what that _more_ might be. Only that it is most unlikely to be crime-related.”

Joan rose and wandered to the piano. Sherlock followed like a cat keeping tabs on the prey just delivered to its master.

“I used to play, you know,” she said, touching the middle C. “My dad wanted Oren and me both to start piano lessons in case we had any musical talent.”

“And did you? Have any?”

She laughed. “Oren quit after six months. I kept going through most of high school, until I needed the time for academics. I was never going to be a concert pianist. And after I left for college I didn’t have easy access to a piano anymore.”

Lightly she ran her middle fingernail up the keys in a quick glissando. “It was good to see Ms. Hudson today. If nothing else, we’re helping her help a friend, right?” She smiled at Sherlock. “Thank you. But for tonight I’m going to bed. Marcus gave me a night’s reprieve from those files; the least I can do is use it to get some rest.”

 

There was no question the days were getting shorter: Joan was up before the sun the next morning, despite the quiet that reigned in the brownstone. She clicked through her news feeds, then searched out a site with free downloads of sheet music.

An hour later she was vaguely aware of Sherlock returning from his rooftop workout, but the real-time challenges of playing the Bach Inventions she used to know kept her from so much as glancing at him. Even at half tempo, it took all her cognitive powers to execute the notes without stumbling too much. And these were pieces she’d mastered by eighth grade, she thought wryly. No point in printing the Grieg.

“WATSON.”

Startled, Joan lifted her hands from the keys. Sherlock stood in the doorway, fingers at his temples.

“Whilst ordinarily I would take pleasure in your trip down memory lane,” he said, “Hmm? The intonation of the instrument--” he pointed at the piano-- “is actively painful.”

“It’s out of tune?” Joan said. “It sounds fine to me.”

Sherlock grimaced. “I suspect, Watson, and I mean no disrespect, that if it were at a level you could discern, I should have ignored it easily. Rather, it is _almost_ in tune.”

“So it’s bugging you, like a dripping faucet you can barely hear,” Joan said. Sherlock nodded tightly.

“All right,” Joan said. She reached up to the music rack and shuffled her printouts together. “I was just getting the hang of it, too. That last one sounded pretty good.”

Sherlock was staring at her fixedly.

“What?” she said.

“Your last piece,” he said. “It was indeed closer to being in tune than the one before it. But the notion that a piano would _selectively_ fall out of tune in a way that privileges some keys over others must be fantastically improbable.”

Joan frowned. “You mean some keys sound drastically better than others. If that’s true, over the whole range of the keyboard...then the piano didn’t just fall out of tune from being moved. Someone tuned it that way deliberately.”

“In a manner sufficiently subtle,” said Sherlock, “that casual playing was unlikely to rouse suspicion. Even yesterday’s examination, during which I played notes and chords but no extended works, didn’t alert me.”

“Philip must have known that someone sensitive to pitch, like you, would hear the piano before it really did fall out of tune,” Joan mused. “I wonder if Erica has perfect pitch.”

Sherlock checked his phone. “She’ll be arriving any minute. In the meantime, Watson, perhaps we can map to which key or keys the piano is best attuned.”

“Sure,” Joan said. She smiled. “Not long before I stopped playing, I started on Bach’s _Well-Tempered Clavier_ , with preludes and fugues in all twenty-four keys.”

“I am familiar,” Sherlock said.

“Well. Too bad I only made it to C sharp major,” Joan said. “But I should still be able to run scales.”

The scales still sounded mostly fine to Joan, to the extent she could play them without wrong notes. A few felt off in a way she couldn’t pin down, but was it her ear or her fingers reacting? She couldn’t tell.

She finished with b minor. Sherlock had listened avidly, had taken notes, but didn’t stop her or give any sign they had found an optimal key.

Joan put her hands in her lap, feeling a little ridiculous in her own long-dormant recital manners. “Well?”

Sherlock gestured her furiously to silence. He ripped a sheet of paper into strips, scribbled on them, and moved them around on the table. He stared at them, frowning.

The doorbell rang, but Sherlock didn’t move. Joan went to answer it.

“Morning, you two. You must be Erica.” She smiled at the young woman behind Ms. Hudson as she took their coats.

“Thank you for taking the piano,” Erica said earnestly to Joan. She was hiding a bit, Joan noticed, behind the curtain of dark hair that hung to her collar-bone. “No one was expecting Uncle Philip to leave it to me, and when he did it seemed weird to ask anyone in the family that he _didn’t_ leave it to, to store it for me…”

“There’s plenty of room here,” Joan reassured her. “And I’m sorry for the loss of your uncle.”

She led them to the kitchen, where the three gathered by the coffeepot. Sherlock did not acknowledge their presence, but paced between table and piano.

Joan sighed. “Erica, does your uncle seem like someone who would have secrets? Hide anything from someone in the family?”

Erica considered. “Not in a mean way,” she said. “But he could be a little sneaky to get someone to do what he wanted. He could always get people to a surprise party without giving it away. He could do it even after he was known for it.” She smiled, remembering.

“Sherlock said he may have had a valuable violin, and yet he left you the piano instead,” Joan said. “Did you ever see him with a violin?”

Erica’s face clouded, and she shook her head. “When I first started playing, in fourth grade, my mom and my aunt asked him about it. They remembered seeing it when they were kids. But they talked about how much money it was worth, and Uncle Phillip hated that. I don’t know, maybe he had to sell it and he felt bad. I never asked.”

Ms. Hudson touched Erica’s shoulder. “I know he was proud and happy that you played,” she said softly. “He once told me music was the happiest calling he could imagine.”

“Watson.” Sherlock’s voice broke through. “Ms. Hudson.”

They all turned toward the piano. Sherlock was standing at the keyboard, left hand in the air as though he were about to start conducting. But instead, he plunked out a melody with the forefinger of his right hand, humming along for emphasis.

“Dah, dah, dah dah DAH, dah dah, da da-da-da-DAH. Hmm?” he finished, looking up expectantly.

There was a short silence.

“Is that...the _Simpsons_ theme?” Erica said.

Sherlock gave her a split-second grin. “It is indeed. Perhaps the only pop culture tune in neither major nor minor key, but this _mode_.” He played another series of notes, this one marching upward on what sounded like consecutive keys.

“Lydian mode,” said Erica. “Starting on F, it’s all the white keys.”

“Precisely,” said Sherlock. The medieval Lydian mode, different from the Ancient Greek,” he added in Ms. Hudson’s direction. “It is for a Lydian scale starting on C that this piano has been tuned. Both white and black keys are affected.”

Joan turned to Erica. “We think the tuning of the piano is some kind of code or message,” she explained. Do you know anyone named Lydia?”

“Not really. Well,” said Erica, and stopped. She was blushing, but maybe that was only because the others were watching her. “There’s Lydia Choe, at school. She’s this amazing pianist--” She broke off. “But she’s a year ahead of me, she’s really nice but I don’t really _know_ her know her.”

Erica, Joan noted, suddenly sounded about fifteen years old.

Ms. Hudson’s face bore a tiny smile. “Do you know where she lives?”

Erica nodded. “She moved into The Crow’s Nest a few months ago. It’s not a dorm, but students have lived there forever because of all the loft space. Students from my school, plus a bunch of dance students.”

“Did you ever mention Lydia to your uncle?” Joan said.

Erica blinked. “Maybe. Probably. After he got sick, there were a lot of days I called him and just chatted about everything I could think of.”

Sherlock strode ahead of them to the entryway. “To the Crow’s Nest, then.”

“But...why?”

Joan distributed coats. “I’ll explain on the way,” she told Erica. “There’s a possibility your uncle planned one last surprise party.”

 

Someone buzzed them up right away, but inside the Crow’s Nest it took Erica a few minutes to find Lydia. Several students were in the large space that would have been a living room in most loft apartments. A dancer stretched at the barre bolted to one wall, while another moved across the floor to a beat he apparently heard through his earbuds. At an old upright piano in the corner, a young woman played snatches of melody and scribbled in a notebook.

“Now _that_ piano’s out of tune,” Joan murmured to Sherlock.

He arched an eyebrow. “Sufficiently so that it brings me no pain.”

“Lucky.”

Erica beckoned them to the window where she and Ms. Hudson were standing with a tall student dressed in jeans and a warm jacket. “This is Lydia,” Erica said, and quickly introduced the rest of them.

“I was just heading over to school to practice,” Lydia said. “Are you okay, Erica? What’s this about?”

Ms. Hudson slipped a funeral program with her friend’s photo on it from her coat pocket. “Lydia, did you know this man?”

Lydia’s eyes widened. “ _Did_ I know him? You’re saying he’s dead?” She collected herself. “His name’s Philip. I only met him once, but he said he’d seen me before. He said he went to a lot of the concerts at school.”

“He did,” Erica said softly. “He was my uncle,” she explained at Lydia’s inquiring look.

“And the occasion of your meeting?” Sherlock said, at the same time Lydia was saying, “Your uncle lived _here_?”

Lydia looked at Sherlock, then around at the rest of them. “I met him the day I moved in. He said he lived in the building but was moving out, somewhere without stairs that was closer to his doctor. He looked really sick, actually.” Her gaze went back to the photo.

“Was he here, here in this room?” Sherlock pressed.

Lydia paused. “No, it was downstairs in the cage. I was piling stuff in there just until it was all in one place, before I carried it upstairs.”

“The cage?” Joan said.

Lydia nodded. “It’s a storage area in the basement, with a chain link compartment for each person who lives here.”

“May we see yours?” said Sherlock.

 

“Nothing’s missing,” Lydia said, looking around the small concrete-floored enclosure they had all crowded into. “I mean, I didn’t keep anything valuable down here anyway.”

“Has anything been added?” Joan said.

“Added?” Lydia looked around, frowned, and walked over to a stack of empty boxes. “Wait.” She reached behind it and pulled out a black case. “This isn’t mine.” She read the luggage tag attached to it, and turned in puzzlement to Erica. “It’s got your name on it.”

Erica first looked at the tag, then knelt on the floor to open the case. Meanwhile, Sherlock peered behind the boxes. Leaning over, he scooped a sheaf of papers from the floor.

“It’s beautiful,” Erica breathed. Even in the low light, the violin seemed to glow golden-red as she lifted it out of the case. “Is this--?” She looked up at Sherlock and Ms. Hudson.

“I would venture that is the violin your uncle kept safe for you,” Sherlock said.

Erica sat back on her heels. “But why is it in Lydia’s storage space? He never lived here! I must have told him about the loft, when I heard you were moving,” she said to Lydia. “I was probably complaining about the dorms again. But…”

“This might be illuminating.” Sherlock handed her the papers, which turned out to be sheet music.

“The Kreutzer Sonata,” Erica and Lydia said simultaneously. The looked at each other and laughed.

“My worst nightmare,” said Erica.

“Tell me about it!” said Lydia.

Erica turned to Joan and Ms. Hudson. “It’s a Beethoven sonata, for violin and piano,” she explained. “Both the parts are incredibly hard. And long.”

“And it’s beautiful and amazing,” said Lydia.

“Yeah,” said Erica. They looked at each other.

“I think,” Lydia said slowly, “that your uncle wanted us to play it together. Don’t you?”

A shy smile was spreading across Erica’s face. “Lydia?” she said. “Is there room at the loft for a piano? Like, a grand piano?”

 

That evening the brownstone felt unusually quiet. Sherlock set up his microscope in the kitchen to test some new stains he’d formulated for soil samples. Joan browsed the internet, waiting for Detective Bell to come by with the case files. 

“Go on,” Sherlock said without looking up. “I can bear one more evening’s faint dissonance. I shall take comfort in Luc’s satisfaction at payment of another moving fee tomorrow.”

Joan smiled and went to the piano. She played a few chords from the Gershwin prelude she’d memorized in ninth grade, then fetched her laptop. Soon the printer upstairs whirred with more sheet music.

“You never mentioned to Erica that you play the violin too,” she remarked as she brought the pages back to the piano.

“For me, Watson, the violin is an artifact. Much as the piano is for you. Perhaps even more so,” he said, eyeing the full music rack.

“You wouldn’t pick the violin again, if you were learning an instrument?”

Sherlock paused. “I have always imagined I might make a good drummer,” he said. “Were it not for the necessity of joining a _band_.”

Joan considered. “You have rhythm,” she agreed. “More than a single stick could suit you.”

She played a little more Bach, the rest of the Gershwin prelude, and a Beethoven rondo she’d once played in a talent show.

“This is fun,” she told Sherlock. “I hope it isn't too painful.”

He massaged his temples with his fingertips. “On the contrary, Watson, I think I am learning to tune it out, so to speak. Continue if you wish. Who knows when you will have access to a piano again?”

“Think I can do a little sight-reading?” Joan said, and launched into “Let It Go” from _Frozen_. “Sing along, Sherlock, I know you know this one!” she called over the chords.

“DOORBELL,” Sherlock bellowed. Joan’s laugh lingered behind her as she ran up the stairs.

Marcus Bell smiled back at her when she opened the door. “Was I hearing Disney tunes? You switching careers on us again?”

“Just reliving some good times,” she said, beckoning him in. "Set those anywhere.”

Bell let the two cardboard boxes thump onto the sofa. “There you go. Afraid I gotta get back, but let me know if anything turns up.”

Joan walked him back to the door. “Sure you can’t stay for takeout?”

“Nah, thanks. Good to see you, though. You look like you got some rest.”

Despite the cold, Joan paused before closing the door. As Bell sauntered to his car, an easy baritone floated behind him--

_...the cold never bothered me anyway…_

 

Back inside, Joan pulled her sweater closer around her and climbed onto the couch, pulling one of the boxes toward her.

Sherlock padded into the room, fetched a volume from the shelves, and paused. “Do you require assistance? I can do a preliminary sort to give you more piano time.”

“You know, I think I’m good,” Joan said, settling the first stack of folders in her lap.

Sherlock nodded and returned to the kitchen. Silence, accentuated by the gentlest sounds of turning pages, settled over the brownstone.


End file.
